Improving the College Football Playoff (if you're not interested in excising an immoral rot in American sports)

December 20, 2020

Oklahoma Sooners wide receiver CeeDee Lamb (2); Oklahoma defeated UCLA 48-14, Sept 14, 2019, Pasadena, CA.

College football gets a lot wrong. On the most fundamental level, I don’t think the NCAA should exist, but even setting that aside, in the summer, college football leaders wished the virus wouldn’t affect their season and then when cases and deaths kept piling up they struck forward anyway, unnecessarily risking the lives of participants, laborers, and spectators alike because it’s a business where people gotta get paid (but not the players, no sir).

All that said, if you’re willing to tolerate blood lust and sociopathic greed to get your kicks watching young people bash each other’s brains to prove your school-associated in-group is superior to others, the College Football Playoff and the specific idea of a committee choosing which teams will play for an official national championship is a great idea.

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And So This Is Christmas

December 11, 2020

I wrote this piece of short fiction as an entry in this year’s Weird Christmas Flash Fiction Contest. While it wasn’t selected for a prize, I’m still proud of it and hope it sparks something in you.


And So This Is Christmas

At dusk I turned onto West 72nd Street and dodged icy patches on the sidewalk until I reached the federal communications office.

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The real problem with Disney's live-action remakes

December 5, 2020


This weekend, my family will watch Disney’s live-action Mulan remake. I’m uninterested in reading reviews or forming a preconception beyond what I remember from the trailer and the original animated movie because there was never any question we would watch it, so there’s no real point in pre-viewing discernment.

Despite my disappointment with most of Disney’s live-action remakes, I’m optimistic it will be a solid movie for the simple reason Mulan is not a musical. I haven’t been able to make it through the Will Smith Aladdin remake, the Emma Watson Beauty and the Beast, or The Lion King, even though the actors are plenty charismatic and there’s solid production value in all of them. Meanwhile, I enjoyed The Jungle Book straight through.

The main problem with those musicals is that generally the songs are slow and drawn out, dragging down everything around them. (For all the songs I’m about to mention, here’s a Spotify playlist putting them in order.)

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